Like the other reviewers, I went to Yancheng for my ‘tick’ of the coastal Migratory Bird Sanctuaries. The visit starts at the iconic museum building, where it’s all about the cranes. The threatened red-crowned crane is the flagship species of the Reserve. The exhibition tells you about crane species all over the world and there is even a video shown of how to fold a paper crane. Another room shows the role cranes play in Chinese culture: it’s especially a Taoist symbol of longevity.

For my visit deeper into the Reserve, I had wanted to rent a golf cart so I could easily reach all corners of the area. However, despite considerable efforts by the guy renting them out, we could not make the full payment circle work with my Weixin Pay account. So I had to go on foot, which limited my radius of course (but the Reserve is not huge anyway). It turned out to be quite a pleasant walk and birds were everywhere, despite it being late in the season. The best chance to see its most famous visitors, the red-crowned cranes, apparently is December-January. I did scoure the sky for larger birds passing by and when looking at my pictures later on my laptop I saw that I had captured two cranes (of an unknown species) as well.

Smaller birds were plentiful on the ground and in the water. These all are common birds for the area, but still nice ones such as the Grey-headed lapwing and Greater scaup. There even is a whole island full of Common terns (Tern Island), which aggresively protect their turf (and offspring). They made a few mock charges towards my head while I walked by.

I completed the full ‘blue loop’ plus two detours a bit more towards the coast in about 2 hours. There are several bird hides along the way and there’s a nice boardwalk across the lake not far from the area where they keep captured cranes. Closer to the museum it all gets a bit more artifical, but overall they do succeed in letting nature be nature.

So where’s the core zone

I gave up trying to locate the core zone myself beforehand as the official maps are so unclear. What is clear though that it mostly comprises a strip of inaccessible mudflats right off the coast, with a few short diversions inland. After overlaying this with the map of the Reserve (lower photo) and consulting with Zos, I think it is where I have placed the yellow arrow pointing at. At the Reserve, they show the UNESCO WH logo everywhere and don’t care about buffer or core zones. The birds also don’t seem to mind.

Getting there and away

I was a bit surprised to not see the previous reviewers mention the train (the obvious choice of transport in China) for reaching Yancheng, but it turns out that this city only got connected to the high-speed rail network in 2019. Now it lies a 2-hour ride from Shanghai. You need to allocate a fair bit of time though for the ‘last mile’ to get to the reserve – I actually started from the airport (I flew in from Changsha) and took a Didi taxi for 130Y (16 EUR) which took 50 minutes. In the Didi app, the reserve is called ‘Yancheng Dandinghe Wetland Ecological Tourism‘. On the way back I took bus K2 to the railway station, which took 1h45 minutes! In hindsight, it would be best to leave the bus as soon as you’re entering the outskirts of the city and take a Didi directly for the remainder of the trip. On the plus side, buses are very frequent and cost only 7 Yuan (you can pay via the Alipay Transport City Bus option).